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The Flight of the Flounder
Submitted by mikael on Thu, 04/03/2008 - 09:06.Intro-text for frontpage:
The creaking of the rowlocks, the shrill cry of the gulls and the surging of the waves accompany us as we row. We examine and empty nets of slender flounder and bladder-wrack. At a depth of four metres, the varying fauna can be seen passing by. We smoke the fish with alder woodchips and juniper twigs.
More than 30 years have passed since my father and I fished for flounder in Nagu. Fishing in silence was one of our ways of communicating with each other. Later, communication and environmental activism became my profession.
Today as I row out to the island where we searched our nets in the 70s, the flounder have disappeared. The visible depth of the murky waters has been cut in half and toxic cyanobacteria pay a visit to our summer paradise each summer. Thread algae formations and the lack of oxygen are suffocating the richly diverse species. Eutrophication has become an unwelcome serpent in this paradise.
A wish for 2008
Submitted by Ulf on Tue, 12/11/2007 - 23:18.Intro-text for frontpage:
It was spring 1997. As a gender trained Swedish citizen I was on a two months parental leave with my 10 months old son. It had been two rewarding months of hard work. The leave was coming to an end.
Meanwhile in the distant Russia, municipalities had started to take up loans from international financing institutions for badly needed investments in the municipal infrastructure. The investments had once been made rather intelligently according to the conditions at the time. E g energy was almost free of charge while building and insulation materials were expensive. So it had once been decided. The market was still to come.
But now market mechanisms were disorderly coming back to Russia. Municipal deficits grew higher and higher. In many city budgets subsidies to district heating were more than half the budget expenses, in some places in North West Russia more than 90 percent. Since citizens were used not to pay, or pay very little for municipal services, it was considered politically impossible to raise tariffs. A fine illustration of the term 'not sustainable'.
